Twenty-one

 

She could never remember what happened after that, or how she returned to the forest. How day ended and night came, or how long she had stared at the sky and the stars.

Or how, as time passed, the jasmine f lowers lost their scent and disappeared and, with them, the birds too seemed to have left.

She moved away from what was their home because of the memories it brought back. She carried only her father’s flute, and a small bag that her mother had given her.

Some of the villagers took pity on her and gave her tea and bread in the beginning. But no one really liked orphans, for they were seen as harbingers of bad luck.

The bicycle man, who was short of help and a bit of a miser, thought that he could save money by letting her clean the bicycles and pump air into the tyres. He did not pay her any money for her labour. ‘Don’t know what she’ll do with the money. Buy drugs or other bad things. Better to feed the wretch is what. I say,’ he would say. And so, every evening after sundown, he would give her a loaf of bread and some fruit as wages for a day of work.

With the death of her parents, her world had changed, suddenly and completely. Gone was the time when she would be tucked into bed with stories, smell the jasmines in her mother’s hair or wake to the sound of her father playing the flute. Gone indeed were laughter and love.

The other children rarely spoke to her. They would find her torn clothes and matted hair amusing and disgusting. They spoke of her loss as retribution for the sins of her past life. This was her punishment and atonement, they would say.

At night, she would lie under an enormous tree, gaze at the stars and dream. Could it be that her parents were up there in the distant sky, she wondered. Or, were they still struggling to become stars, because she had not yet learnt to let go. She would sigh and, many a night, cry herself to sleep for she could not let go.

She had not known the geography teacher then, or indeed, his kind and gentle wife.